Abstract
Humans start responding to music even before birth, and one particular measure, heart rate variability (HRV), reflecting the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) function, has been shown to respond to a music stimulus and to music therapy in the NICU. However, whether and how HRV is related to musical rhythm processing has not been examined. A group of adults (N = 15) passively listened to duple and triple rhythmic patterns while we measured their neural tracking of the rhythmic patterns and PNS function simultaneously using MEG and ECG. Results showed that adults’ neural tracking of beat level rhythm is 2.5 times stronger than their tracking of meter level rhythm, regardless of the energy of the beat and meter in the stimulus. Moreover, this ratio is significantly related to HRV across individuals. That is, the stronger an individual’s brain tracks the meter level rhythm, the higher the HRV, indicating a higher level PNS function (i.e., lower stress). This relation is not affected by an individual’s experience with music training. Data collection in infants (7-month and 11-month) is currently ongoing and the results will be discussed in relation to the adult findings.
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